cleaning a digital house

Like many people my age, I’m trying hard not to accumulate more physical stuff, and I’m actively trying to reduce the amount of potentially useful or emotionally resonant junk I have stuffed in my closets and storage spaces. It’s partly about having room to better organize what I do use… and not having to buy new things simply because I can’t remember buying the old things. Crazy first-world problems. But more than that, it’s about getting rid of the ballast… all that junk is a tether to my past, a weight I drag around or feel like I should be managing.

My digital content is similar. Lighter weight perhaps, but more daunting. Especially when it’s public. More daunting because there’s more of it, scattered across a variety of media and hard disks at home, across countless social media sites active and defunct, nameless archives and databases. And on the web, you can’t throw stuff “away.” Just like on the Earth, there is no true “away,” or deletion. It’s always somewhere.

I’m thinking about this as I figure out what to do with my old web site and blog… a vestige of my old life. The old site represents an intersection of two people who are no longer together, another life that I mark with a signpost and travel onwards from. Some parts should be archived and stored away, perhaps to evaluate later. Other things I do want to bring along with me, evidence of my past activities, my evolving story.

The frustrating thing is that it’s not easy to decide, and even when you do, it’s not easy technically to get rid of, or bring into a new environment. Moving from Nucleus to WordPress, from outmoded technologies (super-compressed Flash movies, tiny thumbnails, hand-hewn HTML) to broadband-friendly content management systems that work on most browsers and devices out of the box.